Introduction

In November 2014, Russian mother, Ella Draper, called me in a desperate fix. She had found my contact details on the website of the Association of McKenzie Friends that I publish, and she needed help: her two children had been forcibly taken from her two months before, and her solicitors weren’t acting in her best interests. I immediately said I would help, but it was to be the beginning of a very shocking awakening process.

Later on I coined the term ‘whistleblower kids‘ to refer to her children, Gabriel and Alisa, due to the huge ring of satanic ritual abuse their candid testimonies had uncovered.

As McKenzie Friends, we are lay legal advisors. Not funded, not organised into a hierarchy. But the co-founder of the association, who happens to be called Belinda McKenzie, has been an ardent campaigner and supporter of human rights for decades.

Belinda’s experiences and linguistic skills are invaluable, especially as she is the spokesperson for the Hollie Greig case. Hollie is a young woman with Downs Syndrome who has a very acute memory and could name all of her abusers – starting with her father and brother.

Hollie’s case is similar to Ella’s: the victim isn’t believed, and the cover-up includes the co-ordinated, systematic victimisation of those trying to help, by those in power. This, while the elite abusers commit ever-more convoluted criminal manipulations of the legal system to cover-up the original crimes and the victimisation.

Belinda warned me that ‘shills’ come with the territory. Shills are people who pretend to help whilst secretly trying to disrupt your activities. Hence I published

Together, the McKenzie Friends are a network of free-standing individuals who share similar goals, experiences and values:

we assist litigants in person, i.e. people who have no legal representation in court

after having come across many victims of white collar crimes in general, and financial and professional institutions in particular, we focus on victims of the family courts, as we consider child snatching to be the most heinous of all institutionalised white collar crimes

in family courts, we specialise in public proceedings rather than on individual custody battles between parents. These usually involve local councils.

As amateurs, we are learning by doing. But we have amassed much experience through our involvement in numerous cases, and have come to see patterns emerge that aren’t generally known about. This invisibility is because family courts were made secret after the Daily Mail exposed the Cleveland child abuse scandal.

Ian Josephs is a veteran McKenzie Friend with a law degree from Oxford, and he has been helping parents for over 50 years. Living in Monaco, he gets between 6 and 10 calls a day and publishes Forced Adoption as a website and book. I turned it into No Punishment without Crime as a blog.

After that I began to specialise in blogs for individual cases as the parents’ experiences were so harrowing:

Vicky Haigh – the first institutional-child-snatch victim to be named in Parliament by John Hemming, the only MP who consistently tried to make a difference in this area

Gloria Musa – the Nigerian Bishop whose five children were taken by Haringey Council; the parents were imprisoned for seven years after a malicious, staged trial. The sixth child was taken and returned to deliberately incriminate the parents. The seventh child was taken from her at birth in prison

Laila Brice – the Latvian mother fighting to get her daughter back from Merton Council

The Pedro Family – the Portuguese family whose five children were taken by Lincolnshire Council

Phil Thompson and family – the great-grandfather who died before seeing his great-grandchildren again – he was challenging Walsall Council

Melissa Laird – the US mother whose 4-year-old son was taken from her in Spain, while she was imprisoned and eventually deported without him by Barnet Council, also responsible for the ill-fate of the whistleblower kids;

and, finally, the worst of all cases: the Whistleblower Kids whose Russian mother took them to Barnet Police station to report the crimes they had experienced at the hands of their UK father, the leader of a Satanic cult, whose 70+ members were abusing 18 other children in 8 schools and a church.

This book is intended to draw attention to these and similar cases, in the light of the following international treaties: